I’m belated in posting about our incredible trip to Hokkaido and the annual Sapporo Snow Festival, but I took over 500 pictures, and it was a bit of a beast culling through them all!

The festival began over sixty years ago when six high school students built six simple snow sculptures in the park and has grown tremendously since then. Today, there are over 400 sculptures each year, with several assisted in their creation by the Japanese Defense Forces! In addition to snow and ice sculptures at three separate sites, there are extensive food vendors, an ice skating rink, musical performances, ice and snow slides, and a ski jump competition. In three days we barely managed to take it all in!

Without further ado…

{yes, those are real fish frozen inside the ice!}

{It was about this point that we realized most of the ice sculptures were all sponsored by beer or sake companies, making this an outstanding event to photograph your children in front of, don’t you think?!}

There were of course places to sit down and take a load off, but you had to watch that your tushie didn’t get too cold on an ice bench!

Cute Husband and I thought it was about time The Cuties started earning their keep so we loaned them out to the McDonald’s girls for a while. The “Big America” sign tickled our funny bone quite a bit.

You know I’m kinda a sucker for a big hair bow.

In addition to the one-story sculptures there were enormous multi-story sculptures that were built with the assistance of the Army. Each of these were supported by scaffolding in back to protect visitors, and some had a stage in front for performances.

Check out the detail work here ~ my favorite part were the icicle walrus whiskers!

You can see even more pictures from the Festival here. If you have the chance to get to Sapporo in February I highly recommend it!

While I touched on the ice and snow sculptures I didn’t even begin to talk about the amazing food we ate! Hokkaido is home to tons of incredible food, but their true speciality is snow crab. Cute Husband got up extra early one morning to have breakfast at the Sapporo Fish Market and brought back really fun pictures. We were all sad he didn’t also bring back this “little” guy!